The Life Business by John Grant

The Life
Business
    "I live in a world made
entirely of memories now," the ageing man says, adopting a solemn
oratorical tone, regarding us earnestly from the other side of the
gray plastic tabletop, a lunar terrain of coffee rings and carved
initials and obscenities. "They're the landscapes and gardens among
which I walk. They're my companions. I can throw sticks for them
and call them to heel."
    One of his pale blue
eyes seems slightly larger, slightly looser than the other, and
reacts more slowly to movements in the room. Its outer corner is
full of tears, and I suspect is always that way. He must have had a
stroke at some stage, although he walked normally enough when he
came in. He's drooling a little, like an over-eager cat. Perhaps
these signs aren't the aftermath of stroke but merely side-effects
of his medications.
    As I watch, a dribble
of tear makes its jerky way down his grey-stubbled cheek to join
the well of drool at the corner of his mouth.
    It's the way we'll all
be, eventually. He just got there sooner than most of us.
    Martinmas told me I'd
find the old man an interesting case. So far there's been little
evidence to support that assessment.
    "Tell us a memory,"
says Martinmas now, seated alongside me.
    The older man shifts
his gaze slightly to focus on Martinmas's face. "With a lady
present?" He gives a slight inclination of his head to indicate
me.
    "She'll have heard
worse," says Martinmas.
    I join him in a small,
professional chuckle.
    "Even so. Even so. It
wasn't her embarrassment I was thinking of. I'll not be telling you
anything too juicy, then. Which is hard for me" – he clumsily
parodies the apologetic – "because so much of my younger life was
filled with juicy bits. I was a lad whose arse the ladies couldn't
help but want to get their hands on, if you'll take my
meaning."
    I smile, again
professionally. "There's nothing you can say that'll shock me." As
soon as the words are out I hate the way I sound so prissy.
    He holds my gaze in a
long stare, then looks down at his knotty hands on the table in
front of him. They're big hands. He was once a big man.
    "Even so..." he
repeats.
    ~
    The first thing I
noticed when the old khaki Army bus stopped at Magilligan Point was
how the grass covering the uneven ground between here and the
steely grey water of Lough Foyle was the same colour as the rusted
corrugated iron of the roofs of the three long Nissen huts. Sixty
teenaged boys, me one of them, would be spending the next two weeks
in those huts, pretending to be soldiers by day and at night
thinking about how maybe being at home wasn't that bad after
all.
    This was back in the
mid-'sixties – must have been 'sixty-four or 'sixty-five, I'd be
thinking. It was around the time my mum and my dad were having all
the fights about the divorce they were planning to get. They'd
separated a few months before; now they were wading into the legal
stuff about who'd get the house and who'd get the car.
    When the school cadet
force put out the announcement that there'd be a field trip to the
far side of the Irish Sea this summer, Mum had been one of the
first parents to sign the forms.
    My parents had already
got me out from under their feet most of the time by sending me
away to public school in Edinburgh – too far away for weekends home
in Chelmsford. Now yet another sixteen days of uncomplication was
theirs thanks to the good graces of the British Army.
    And it was free.
    Me? It was no skin off
my nose to miss a few of their screaming matches. I was as glad to
see less of my parents as they were to see less of me.
    Once I got off the bus
I noticed the second thing, other than the alien landscape, that
was strange about this place whose name had had everybody on the
bus doing Eccles and Bluebottle impressions ever since the ferry
landed in Belfast.
    It was the smell.
    The air in the bus had
been pretty full of the concentrated aroma of underwashed boys and
incredibly hilarious farts, so I knew I shouldn't be